City of Tarantis Progress & Plans

I’ve been steadily plodding along, mapping the original Judge’s Guild Tarantis into the new century, from scanned bitmap to sleek vector. Along the way, I stopped and recreated the logo which I would guess was originally created by Jennell Jaquays. I am not sure about the colors, but it should definitely tie back to the sea if possible.

As for the map itself, good grief, it just seems to go on and on. I’ve gotten many cases of white-line fever, missing big parts of buildings and needing to go back and fix forgotten or overlooked sections. I am working as fast as I can, but there is a certain monotony to it that becomes mind-numbing after 2 or 3 hours.

Tarantis taking form

The map above is altered from the original in the sense that I have taken everything off of the grid system. The above image is just a quick experiment, but I plan on taking the entire city off of the harsh North/South grid system and laying the majority of the sections off at slight angles. It already feels a bit less mechanical in nature and I will continue to work at it, hoping to give it a more humanistic, friendly touch.

I’ve finished 5 of 10 regions – and while that sounds like 50%, it is probably closer to 60%. The temple and palace regions are fairly low detail, leaving the scholars section, the docks, and finally all of the buildings scattered around town.

Once the town is slightly rearranged and reordered, I will then address the city walls. I anticipate needing to shift them a bit, so they will be the last thing done. I want to study how long walls and gates were built and will try to “build” a functional city wall.

I will also NOT put walls up around the docks like the original. The idea of navigating a ship through a narrow aperture almost made my head explode and it was my only significant dislike of the original map.

Rather than enclose the docks with a wall, I will place a man-made island that shields the port while housing a building for steersmen. Ships will pay a fee to be steered into port and later for space on the docks. Taxes on the cargo in the holds will be accessed before the ship can leave.

I am also debating how I am going to handle lettering. I do plan on lettering the streets, but I am less sure about numbering the buildings. Since I am going to use this with Fantasy Grounds, all I need to do is to place a pin and it is all good. On the other-hand, the map will be worthless to anyone but me which would sort of suck. So a player’s map (no notes) and a DMs map is the likely solution.

On a similar trail of thought, I am not really making any concessions towards printing. It might be an error that I regret later, but we’re a long way into the digital age and anyone who needs a print probably can manage to convert a color image to grayscale, section the map, and otherwise take care of the problem themselves.